On community

This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching iOSDevUK. I threw away my earlier draft; you’re about to read something different. Where you see “we”, “us” or “our community” you should probably take it to mean Cocoa programmers, though read on to find out why “us” doesn’t always make sense.

Acknowledgements

So many people have contributed to this, by saying things that I agree with, by saying things that I disagree with, by organising conferences, or in other ways. I’ve tried to cite where appropriate but I’ve probably missed someone somewhere. Sorry :-(.

Introduction

This article is more the presentation of a problem and some thoughts about it than an attempt to argue in favour of a particular solution. I’ll investigate what it means to be in “the Cocoa programming community”, beginning with whether or not Apple is in a community of its own devising. I’ll ask whether there’s room for more collaboration in the community, and whether the community of Cocoa programmers encompasses all Cocoa programmers. Finally, I’ll notice that these are questions as yet unanswered, and explore what the solutions and non-solutions might be.

On Apple and the community

This is the bit that I’d done most work on already, as it was the topic of my Appsterdam talk. The summary of that talk is pretty much the same as Dave’s working-with-Apple pro tip in his iOSDevUK talk. As his was more succinct, I’ll use that version:

The thing is that as Scotty said, the community wins when all of its members win. But he also said that Apple isn’t in the community, so don’t they obviate themselves from this relationship?

Well, no. If we look at the community that most of the people reading this post – and that most of the people at iOSDevUK – consider themselves a member of, it’s the community of iOS app makers. It happens that all of these people depend on the same thing: on iOS. Being nice to Apple and helping them just makes good business sense. If you’re not helping Apple to win, they might decide to help you lose.

On a related subject: for Apple to win, it’s not necessary for anyone else to lose. In fact, I’m not the first person to say this. I’m stealing from a man who was, at the time this quote was coined, freshly CEO after having been a management consultant at Apple:

We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault.

So Microsoft, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 don’t have to lose. Google and Android don’t have to lose. Enterprise Java programmers don’t have to lose. Your competitors don’t have to lose. The team in Apple that make that thing that just crashed don’t have to lose.

On that last note, Apple is the biggest company in the world and you’re supplying one or a handful of 600,000 or so different replaceable components that helps them make a trivial fraction of their income. So if the choice you give them is “do what I need or I’ll stop working with you”, they’ll pick option 2. “Fix Radar or GTFO”? It’s cheaper and easier for Apple to GTFO.

That’s not to say the best strategy is always to do whatever Apple want. Well, actually it probably is in the short term, but Apple is real people and real people benefit from constructive feedback too.

Just who is “them”, anyway?

Around the time that I started to be a proper software writing person, there was a strong division in Mac development. The side I was in (and I was young, opinionated, easily led, and was definitely in this faction) was the Yellow Box. We knew that the correct way to write software for the Mac was to use the Foundation and AppKit APIs via the Objective-C or Java languages.

We also knew that the other people, the Blue Boxers who were using libraries compatible with Mac OS 8 and the C or C++ languages, were grey-bearded dinosaurs who didn’t get it.

This sounds crazy now, right? Should I also point out that I wrote a Carbon app, just to make it sound a little crazier?

That’s because it is crazy. Somehow those of us who had chosen a different programming language knew that we were better at writing software; much better than those clowns who just made the most successful office suite ever, the most successful picture editing app ever, or the most successful video player ever. Because we’d taken advice on how to write software from a company that was 90 days away from bankruptcy and had proven incapable of executing on software development, we were awesome and the people who were making the shittons of money on the most popular software of all time were clueless idiots.

But what about the people who were writing Mac software with WXWindows (which included myself), or RealBASIC, or the PerlObjCBridge (which also included me)? Where did those fit in this dichotomy? Or the people over on Windows (me again) or Solaris (yup, me here)?

The definition of “us” and “them” is meaningless. It needs to be, in order to remain fluid enough that a new “them” can always be found. Looking through my little corner of history, I can see a few other distinctions that have come and gone over time. CodeWarrior vs Project Builder. Mach-O vs CFM. iPhone vs Android. Windows vs Mac. UNIX vs VMS. BSD vs System V. KDE vs GNOME. Java vs Objective-C. Browser vs native. BitKeeper vs Monotone. Dots vs brackets.

Let’s look in more detail at the Windows vs Mac distinction. If you cast your mind back, you’ll recall that around 2000 it was much easier to make money on Windows. People who were in the Mac camp made hand-waving references to technical superiority, or better user interfaces, or breaking the Microsoft hegemony, or not needing to be super-rich. Many of those Mac developers are now iPhone developers. In the iOS vs Android distinction, iOS developers readily point to the larger amount of money that’s available in making iOS apps…wait.

O(community)

The community contribution fraction

As Scotty said, an important role in a community is that of the reader/consumer/learner, the people who take and use the information that’s shared through the community. Indeed in any community this is likely to be the largest share of the community’s population; the people who produce and share the information are also making use of it too.

The thing is, that means that there are many people who are making use of those great ideas, synthesising them, and making even new and better ideas. And we’re not finding out about them. Essentially there is more knowledge than there is opportunity to share knowledge.

It’d be great to have some way to make it super-easy for everyone who was involved in “the community” to contribute, even if it’s just to add a single thought or idea to the pool. As Scotty said, there’s no way you can force people to contribute, and that’s not even desirable as it’s a great way to put people off talking to you ever again.

So you can’t hold a gun up to people and force them to tell you a fact about Objective-C. You can ensure everyone knows what forms of contribution take place; perhaps they’ll find something that’s easier than they thought or something they’ll enjoy. Perhaps they’ll give it a go, and enjoy it.

Face to face

Conferences are definitely not that simple way for everybody to contribute. Conferences are great, though as I’ve said before there aren’t enough seats for them to have a wide direct impact on the community. Tech conferences will never be a base for broad participation, both due to finite size (even WWDC comprises less than one percent of registered developers on the platforms) and limited scope for contribution – particularly the bias toward contributors with “prior”.

One “fix” to scale up the conference is to run the conference all year long. This allows people who don’t like the idea of being trapped in a convention with the same 200 people for a week the option to dip in and out as they see fit. It gives far more opportunity for contribution – because there are many more occasions on which contribution is needed. On the other hand, part of the point of a conference is that the attendees are all at the same place at the same time, so there’s definitely some trade off to be had.

Conferences and Appsterdams alike lead to face-to-face collaboration; the most awesomest flavour of collaboration there is. In return, they require (like Cocoaheads, NSCoder or whatever you call your pub/café meet) that you have the ability to get to the venue. This can call for anything from a walk down the street via a couple of ten-hour flights to relocating yourself and your family.

Smaller-scale chances for face to face interaction exist: one-on-few training courses and one-on-one mentoring and apprenticeships. These are nearly, but not quite, one-way flows of information and ideas from the trainer or sensei to the students or proteges. There are opportunities to make mentoring a small part of your professional life so it doesn’t seem to require a huge time investment.

Training courses, on the other hand, do. Investment by the trainer, who must develop a course, teach it, respond to feedback, react to technology changes and so on. Investment by the trainees, who must spend an amount of time and money attending the course, then doing any follow-up exercises or exams. They’re great ways to quickly get up to speed with a technology by immersing yourselves in them, but no-one is ever going to answer the question “how can I easily contribute to my community?” with “run a training course”.

Teaching at a distance

A lower barrier to entry is found by decoupling the information from the person presenting the information. For as long as there has been tech there have been tech books; it’s easy (if you have $10-$50) to have a book automatically delivered to your house or reader and start absorbing its facts. For published books, there’s a high probability that the content has been proofread and technically reviewed and therefore says something a bit accurate in a recognisable language.

On the other hand, there are very few “timeless” books about technology. Publisher schedules introduce some delay between finishing a manuscript and having something to sell, further reducing any potential shelf life. If you’re in the world of Apple development and planning to say anything about, for example, Objective-C or Xcode, you’re looking at a book that will last a couple of months before being out of date.

Writing a book, then, takes a long time which already might be a blocker to contribution for a lot of people. There’s also the limitation on who will even be invited to contribute: the finite number of publishers out there will preferentially select for established community members and people who have demonstrated an ability to write. It’s easier to market books that way.

The way to avoid all of that hassle is to write a blog (hello!). You get to write things without having to be selected by some commissioning editor. Conversely, you aren’t slowed down by the hassles of having people help you make the thing you write better, either—unless you choose to seek that help.

You then need to find somebody to read your blog. This is hard.

If someone else already has an audience, you can take advantage of that. Jeff Atwood previously wrote about using stack overflow as a blog, where you’d get great reach because they bring their audience. Of course, another thing you can do on stack overflow is answer questions from other people: so that quick answer you contribute is actually solving someone’s problem.

This is, in my opinion, the hallowed middle ground between books (slow, static, hard to get into, with a wide reach) and blogs (fast, reactive, easy to pick up, hard to get discovered). Self-publishing a book is a lot like spending ages writing a long blog post. On the other hand, contributing to a community resource like a Q and A site or a wiki means only writing the bit of the book that you’re best placed to contribute. It also means sharing the work of ensuring correctness and value among the whole contributor base.

Our community / People with ideas ≪ 1

Whatever your definition of “the community”: the iOS developer community, the object-oriented programming community, the developer community—there are many more people who aren’t in that community. But they still have things to say that could be interesting and help us see what we do in different ways.

I’m not so sure that there are people out there doing what we do who don’t even passively engage with the rest of the community. Maybe there are, maybe there are lots. But I’m sure most people have at least read a book, or done a search that ended up at a mailing list post or blog entry. Very few people will never have used community-supplied resources; although it’s possible that there are programmers out there who’ve learned everything they know from first party documentation.

What I am sure of is that if you’re an Objective-C developer building mobile apps and you only listen to other Objective-C developers building mobile apps, you’re missing out on the information and ideas you could be taking from everyone else. Dave Addey told us to go and visit museums and art galleries to get inspiration, but that’s not all there is to it. Talk to someone doing Objective-C in a different context. Talk to someone doing Java, or Clojure. Talk to business people, or artists, or musicians. Break out of the echo chamber, and find out whether what other people are doing could be applied to what you’re doing.

Conclusions

As promised, there aren’t really any conclusions here. It’s more a collection of my own thoughts dumped out from brain to MarsEdit in order to let me make sense of them, and to stop me having to think about them at bedtime.

What’s clear is that there are a load of different ways for people to contribute to a community. Consumption of other people’s thoughts, advice and ideas is itself a very beneficial service as it’s how new ideas get synthesised, how new practices are formed and how the community collectively improves its output. It would be even better if what those people were doing were also made available and shared with the rest of us, to achieve an exponential growth in experience and advancement across the whole community.

But that’s not guaranteed to happen. The best thing to do is not to try driving people to contribute, but to give them so many opportunities to do so that, at some point, someone in the community will be in the position that sharing something is really easy and they choose to do so.

Other techniques to improve the number of ideas you get from the community are to be less adversarial in your definition of community, and more broad in your inclusion. The “community of people making iOS apps with Objective-C” is small, the “community of people making things” is universal.